Evening Post. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30,1933. FACT OR FICTION IN THE NURSERY

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 79, 30 September 1933, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30,1933.

FACT OR FICTION IN THE NURSERY

A vivid impression of the "incredibly indigestible mental fare" that was offered to "the poor little inmates of the nurseries" when she was one of them has been made upon the mind of Lady Laura Ridding by a reperusal of the books that she then possessed, and it is skilfully conveyed to the reader of her article on "A Nursery Library Seventy-five Years Ago" in the "Contemporary Review" of September last. She points out that two of the dominant movements of the period, though fiercely opposed to one another on everything else, concurred in their prescription of an arid diet for childhood.' The evangelicals fully shared the belief of their sworn enemies the materialists that "nothing should be set before the young that was not saturated with exhortation, instruction, and warning." Earlier in the century this unhappy prescription had been deplored by a great man who did not belong to either of these camps, and whose common sense, imagination, and humanity kept him just as far from both of them when they agreed as he was from either of them when they differed. In the rising generation of my time, said Sir Walter Scott, there will be no poets, wits, or orators, because all play of the imagination is now carefully discouraged, and books written for young persons are generally mere dry records of Facts, unenlivened by any appeal to the Faicy. . The authority cited by Lady Laura Ridding on the other side is of peculiar interest just now. It is that of Mrs. Mortimer, the authoress of "Peep of Day," a masterpiece of the nursery, which was honoured by a centenary article in "The Times" oh June 27 and afterwards by affectionate tributes from Lord Snowden and other correspondents. Too long, she wrote, have the immortal minds of these volatile beings been captivated, by the adventures and achievements of knights and princesses, of fairies and magicians; it is time to excite their interest in real persons, .and real events. In'; childhood that taste is formed which leads the youth to delight in novels and romances. . . . And what is the effect of this perusal? Many a young mind, inflated with a desire for admiration and adventure, grows tired of home, impatient of restraint, indifferent to simple pleasures, and averse to sacred instructions. How important, therefore, early to endeavour to prevent a taste for Fiction, by cherishing a taste for Facts. This, mortal conflict between Fact and Fiction as though it were one between good and, evil, for the possession of the soul of childhood was of course no new creation of the 19th century. About 1550 Rhodes's "Book of Nurture," which is one of the earliest books on education in the language, contains the warning: Keep them from reading of feigned fables, ' vain ' fantasies, and wanton stories and songs of /love, which bring much mischief to youth. Every work of the imagination, whether good or bad, is thus merged in a common condemnation.. The alternative was "good Godly books." -But as Mr. F. J. Harvey Darton says in his chapter on "Children's Books". in the "Cambridge History of English Literature," from which our quotation is taken, "there was not any\ special provision qf such works." But when special provision came to be made for the spiritual and recreational needs of the child it was at first of a forbidding and even terrifying character. Mr. Darton describes it as "a grim affair with few literary merits" and with hell" fire as its chief theme. In "A Little Rook for Little Children" (1702), the Rev. Thomas White recommends his young readers to read no Ballads or foolish Books, but the Bible, and the "Plain man's path way to Heaven," a very plain holy book for you; get the "Practice of Piety"; Mr. Baxter's "Call to tho Unconverted"; Allen's "Allaruni to the Unconverted"; read the Histories of the Martyrs that dyed for Christ; and in the "Book of Martyrs" ... Bead also often Treatises of Death, and Hell, and Judgement, and of the Love and Passion of Christ. "Some perfectly horrible stories of martyrdom ensue," says Mr. Darton. And the story-tellers were at first as sulphurous and gruesome as the preachers. _ * How just a century later the admirable Mrs. Trimmer, whose "History of the Robins'\(l7B6), as it is now called, was in print a few years ago and fully deserved the honour, narrowly escaped having the Society for the Suppression of Vice on her track is one of the queerest things that Mr. Darton has to tell. Born in 1741, she had been brought up on Perrault, the author of "Cinderella" and other tales, and had seen no harm in him. A colourless reference to these tales in "The Guardian of Education," a magazine which Mrs. Trimmer edited from 1802 to 1804, drew a complaint from a correspondent who asked for a condemnation of "Cinderella" as perhaps one of the most exceptionable books ever written for children. . . . It paints the worst passions that can enter into the human heart, and of which little children should, if possible, be totally ignorant; such as envy, jealousy, a dislike to mothers-in-law (sic) and half-sisters, vanity, a lovs of dress, etc., etc. "Puss in Boots," by the same hand,

was open, we may note in passing, to even stronger condemnation. Mrs. Trimmer had to admit that her correspondent was right, and her second thoughts were confirmed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice in a tremendous manifesto denouncing such stories. Mrs. Trimmer had side-stepped just in time! "It is difficult, indeed," says Mr. Darton, "to find any toleration of fairyland in these stern moralists." Even in our own more enlightened era moralists of the same type have been shocked by the immorality of "Uncle Remus." The redoubtable Mrs. Sherwood, Mrs. Trimmer's younger and sterner contemporary, inherited and improved the hell-fire tradition, the "morbid and gloating piety" of the 18th century purveyors for chHdhood, and their uncompromising hostility to fairies. Mr. Darton describes her revision of Sarah Fielding's "Governess" in 1820 as "probably the fiercest example of editorial recension in the whole of literature." The book was practically rewritten and two whole sections .were cut right out. In the original there had been two fairy tales:'-these were cut out because such stories "can scarcely ever be rendered profitable. . . . You are, I know, strongly impressed with the doctrine of the depravity of human nature," and it would be.quite impossible to introduce that doctrine as a "motive of action in such tales." But piety, like other good things, may overreach itself, and the horrors of death and sin and hell-fire may for an ! analogous reason be overdone. One of Mrs. Sherwood's 300 works was an adaptation of Bunyan under the title, "The Infant's Pro^ gress from the Valley of Destruction to Everlasting Glory." It, of course, supplied the doctrine which cannot be introduced into a fairy tale, and emphasised the depravity of the human heart and the need for a sense of conviction of sin. . But its significant effect on one not hopelessly abandoned infant pilgrim is testified by Lady Laura Bidding's confession. The little pilgrims whose history it related had, she writes, a foster-brother, a horrible companion always with them, called Inbred Sin. He never slept, never observed any Sabbath Day, was always contriving mischief and setting others to execiite.it; a stranger to shame, full of falsehood, hating all that was good, loving all evil, always trying to persuade the children to do evil. I am afraid that the freaks of this imp of iniquity appealed more to my,childish sense of adventure than the solemn march of the infant pilgrims.

Has "Cinderella" or "Puss in Boots" or "Uncle Remus" ever done worse than that?